DragonFlyBSD 1.0 Released

eeg3 writes "One year after starting the project as a fork of the FreeBSD-4.x tree, the DragonFly Team is pleased to announce its 1.0 release. Check out the project's diary for a list of the improvements the project has implemented. Also, be sure to grab it from one of the mirrors."

Comments

Serious question:

[Anonymous Coward]

What was the reason behind this fork?

Re:Serious question:

[RupertJ]

Totally agree on the SMP thing. I work with some seriously "into it" techies (including myself) who live and breathe Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD/Solaris/HP-UX/IRIX at both work and home. Not a single one of them has a personal box with more than one CPU. Maybe that's a European, or maybe even specifically UK trend for developer's own kit at home. Weird. Maybe others would like to chip in here.

As for the "two imports" thing, the only OSS project that I was aware of a serious initial temporary code-freeze on was when Theo forked NetBSD into OpenBSD and audited the lot. But that said, they're now using NetBSD's SMP code as a starting point. Not that that is a bad thing, by any stretch of the imagination.

With Perl being dropped from FreeBSD, what are they actually replacing it with? (I know very little about the FreeBSD project and it shows =).

RJ

Re:Serious question:

[NanoGator]

"Only downside (and maybe this is good for the reason mentioned just now) is that most apps don't take advantage of multiple cpus yet."

It's still useful even when you don't have SMP software. If you have an app that's burnin all of one CPU up, you still have the other CPU available to do just about anything else. For example, I have a plugin for Lightwave that is a 3D renderer. It's not multi-threaded yet, so I couldn't make it go faster with both processors. So while that was rendering, I played a game of Quake. Q3 ran great, and the rendering still happened on time. Pretty slick.

Re:Serious question:

[tverbeek]

Once you use a dual cpu machine, you never want to go back to single cpu. This is true whether you're using Windows 2000/XP or *BSD/Linux.

Or OS X.

Budget constraints forced me to buy the least-possible PowerMac G5 for my home system last year, with only 1 CPU. The dual-G5 systems at the work place make me wish they paid me well enough to afford one ("two"?) myself.

Re:Serious question:

[nusuth]

Once you use a dual cpu machine, you never want to go back to single cpu.

Hmmm, isn't it a bit too far-fetched? What's the advantage of dual cpu machine for Internet browsing? Or editing files? Or for gaming (decent video card is more important here)?

He doesn't say a dual cpu box is optimal, he say you don't want to go back, which, IMHO, is very true. I have used a few single cpu computers faster than mine but none have the same fluidity and responsiveness of my dual athlon mp box. This is purely a perception thing. Many GUI and IO operations use 100% of CPU time for short burst intervals. On a single CPU system, you notice unresponsiveness. A faster CPU just makes that time shorther. On a SMP system, as long as not all CPUs are pegged - which doesn't happen all to often- you don't notice that.

Re:Serious question:

[eofpi]

What's the advantage of dual cpu machine for Internet browsing? Or editing files? Or for gaming (decent video card is more important here)?

I'm sitting on a dual athlon system right now, and, as others have said, there's a feeling of fluidity with SMP systems that makes it worth it if you multitask much, even if it's all relatively lightweight stuff (IRC, web browsing, email, etc.).

For file editing, it depends on the kind of files. Your basic office stuff won't benefit any more than the aforementioned internet usage will. But if you're working with media, it will go a lot faster (not quite a 100% gain, because of SMP management overhead, memory bandwidth limitations, etc., but it will be well above 50% for anything multithreaded, and allows you to do multiple instances for single-threaded things).

Gaming will start to show more benefit as hardware shifts things that are traditionally hardware functions into their drivers (particularly 3D audio in sound cards, as shown here). When a sound card is trying to use 30% of a cpu for 3D audio (as one sound card in that link did at times), that'll have quite an effect on gaming performance on a single-cpu system. An SMP system will just have the other cpu pick up the extra load from the sound card drivers, along with whatever network, AI, and other threads the OS load balances onto it, leaving the first cpu free to handle whatever's most cpu-intensive in the game (usually graphics).

Packages?

[RLiegh]

What is the ports/packages situation look like for Dragonfly? Have they ported the old ones over, or is their selection severely limited?

New BSD distros...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Deserve their own slashdot icon. Give this thing 3 months, and if they're still around, do the right thing Taco.

Re:Sounds cool

[eeg3]

Although their team is small, it's compiled with very competent and capable developers such as Jeffrey Hsu and Matt Dillon, among others.

Also, a small commit team helps get things done at a faster rate, whereas it's not so hard to get things added.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Good News Everyone!
Turns out that *BSD is stronger than ever!
According to an Inernetnews article, Netcraft has confirmed that *BSD has "dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
There has been a steady increase in *BSD developers over the past decade.
There are currently 307 FreeBSD developers as of the 2004 core team election.
You can read more about FreeBSD here

If you would like to try out a BSD, you can download: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or DragonflyBSD
Enjoy!

Any visible userland differences

[beforewisdom]

Does Dragonfly offer any visible differences to the casual end user?

Re:Does it run Linux?

[kardar]

FreeBSD (I am using 4.10) has a Gentoo "stage 1" port, actually.

There is a directory called /usr/compat/linux, under which you have all the usual /usr (that would be /usr/compat/linux/usr/, if you know what I mean) and /bin and /lib, and so on...

so you... "chroot" into /usr/compat/linux and then you can "make system" or whatevever. It's not bad.

The default is a Red Hat - I have what is essentially a basic Red Hat 9.0 system on my FreeBSD machine, there is also a port for Debian Stable.

So you can do vmware for Linux, or you can do vmware for FreeBSD, just like you can do Mozilla for Linux, or any other app for Linux. I imagine you could install portage under /usr/compat/linux/usr/portage by chrooting into /usr/compat/linux and emerging sync, and then emerge whatever you want - as long as you are chrooted, it should work (I haven't tried it). So everything you emerge should be done while you are chrooted into /usr/compat/linux - if I understand this correctly -- however, the Gentoo port, the Gentoo FreeBSD port, under /usr/ports/emulators/, would be installed like any other FreeBSD port - and actually, there are many FreeBSD "Linux" ports that can be installed automatically from the FreeBSD ports system, no chrooting or anything required. The chrooting would be if you wanted to leave FreeBSD behind and enter into Linux land - apparently this works, but I haven't tried it. Everything I have needed to install that is a Linux binary has been available as a FreeBSD port.

Another cool thing is that you can apparently upgrade from FreeBSD 4.9 and above to Dragonfly BSD, which is something I will probably be doing at some point in the future.

future vs. now

[r00t]

You're comparing future DragonflyBSD features
with current Linux features.

Hey, Linux has a future too. It isn't stagnant.
There are a number of active projects to give
seamless clustering to Linux. The filesystem
will be shared, including coherent page cache
and user-accesible (flock, etc.) locks. There
are a couple SSI projects. This stuff now has
a conference of it's own. Major developers care.

Team Interview

[No_Weak_Heart]

Here's a nice, in depth interview at ONLamp with the core developer team from just last week. Covers a lot of ground, I found it very informative.

Re:uname(1)

[HungSquirrel]

DragonFly sage.**domain_removed** 1.0-RELEASE DragonFly 1.0-RELEASE #4: Sun Jul 11 20:29:40 GMT 2004 root@:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386

Installed it this morning. Worth noting:

- Dfly refers to BSD slices using the Linux/Windows term 'partition', and to BSD partitions as 'subpartitions'.

- Installer cannot create a partition; you must do so manually with fdisk. Installer can format the partition, however.

- Easy, streamlined installer that gives you a base BSD system.

- DOES NOT INSTALL A TEXT-BASED BROWSER OR WGET. This really got on my nerves. I had to download the links browser tarball onto my server and FTP in to get it. Without a working text browser, it is hard to download needed packages.

- Includes the FreeBSD ports system and sample supfiles. So, if I really wanted Links, I could have waited an hour while I did a cvsup and then downloaded the port.

- Does not have bash as the default shell. No big deal, just get a port or download the source once you have a text based browser.

- When compiling software, do './configure --build=386bsd' to tell it the system type. Most configs fail if you don't specify the build.

- Dfly feels faster and snappier at the CLI than most Linuxes and even FreeBSD. This may be psychological.